Portside

There can be no justification or excuse for the mass killings of innocent people of Paris. The horror experienced in Paris last week is not isolated, it has been played out with ruthless regularity in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine and many other countries, sometimes at the hands of Western forces. While Western hearts have been choked by the anguish of Parisians, we must also extend our horror and concern for millions of innocents throughout the world.

The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren't sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. M15 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives.

Is contemporary altruism the new activism? Or is it what writer Teju Cole once called an iteration of a "White Savior Industrial Complex"? Ashley Karlin takes up these complicated questions in this review of Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, by scientist-turned-Buddhist philosopher Matthieu Ricard. The answers, she suggests, may have as much to do with questions of power as with the desire to do good.

Prior to the Boston Globe’s investigation, the sexual abuse of minors by priests was one of the Catholic Church’s worst-kept secrets. Spotlight's telling of the Church’s sex abuses reminds viewers how good, honest journalism has the power to transform a community.

The movement for labor to endorse Bernie Sanders is part of an effort to bring political decision-making back to the rank-and-file.

Food scientists are trying to figure out if very faint scents can trick your brain into tasting something that isn’t there.

A small group of IKEA workers in suburban Boston launched a union organizing campaign this week—and immediately attracted the support of Democratic Party presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley.

Over 60% of Southwest's 8,000 pilots, represented by SWAPA, voted no on the agreement on November 4. Since then, the union's president and negotiating committee has submitted their resignations.

Plenty of shows can self-reflexively comment on Hollywood’s systemic diversity and race problems, but Master Of None does so within an episode that simultaneously practices exactly what it’s preaching, which gives the show legitimacy.

Alfred Hayes wrote it as a poem in upstate New York at a left wing retreat called Camp Unity during the Summer of 1936. Hayes met Earl Robinson there and upon hearing Hayes recite his poem Robinson instantly put the words to music as part of a campfire session celebrating the trade union icon. By that September the song had been published in The Daily Worker and became a popular song with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting Franco’s fascists in Spain.